Critics reviews

This stylization lends elegance to a brutal world. Style and content come together merging the graceful with the ugly.

If you want to know what great filmmaking looks like, watch how [To] aligns people inside his frame, creating first visual interest through their arrangement — he often places the three assassins in a triangle — and then visual excitement when they start to move. He likes fast edits and restless cameras, and dynamically mixes long shots with close-ups, but his images bristle with tension before he makes a single cut.

It contains all of the striking emphasis on movement one would expect from a To film, including a myriad of superb action set pieces orchestrated in truly unique locales, but it lacks the character complexity inherent in To's best work, relegating most of the manly interactions to simple grunts oozing with obvious genre cues and drama. In this sense, Vengeance is uneven, fractured, and occasionally trite, even while consistently engaging the beauties of extreme stylization.

Director Johnnie To (Election) has a poetic, tightly choreographed style that emphasizes complex rhythms and small details (not the least of which are the cragged lines of Hallyday's face) and imbues the standard revenge drama with an almost Buddhist ephemerality: from the bursts of gunfire to the empty sky, nothing amounts to more than a ripple. That the father is losing his memory gives this theme an affecting echo in the narrative.

Vengeance has a few of the most intense and original action sequences to be found in a contemporary film. I'm surprised To hasn't been more widely imitated in the West, as his wide widescreen stagings are gorgeous, terrifying, even poignant. To shows you everything, you see every character and variable at the same time, and that reveals—paradoxically—how little you can see.

Just because it's business as usual for To doesn't mean that VENGEANCE is workmanlike or routine. In fact, it's kind of a masterpiece. To, one of the greatest directors in the world, is incapable of making a bad movie or "taking it easy"; a roughly 15-minute sequence set in a wooded park at night features the finest, most intense directing you'll probably see on the screen this year. Like all To films, this is essential.

Vengeance's power lies partly in the way To positions people in the frame, creating tension with compositions like the triangle Costello and his men form in the fork of a subway tunnel when they first meet. It's partly in the way he uses bright light and dark shadows, like the stuttering lights that add another element of instability and tension to that subway scene. But it's mostly in his colors: saturated bursts like the paintball-bright red blood that mists the faces of the men in his firefights...

To's force is in his improbabilities—men's self-set fates carried to their full, preposterous conclusions. They kill each other because they have to, and like each other just because they do, like Hawks characters taking on the system as a good excuse to hang out with each other. If not one of To's worst films, Vengeance is one of his best.